New Book by Lionel Rolfe: “The Fat Man Returns”
This is a sequel to The Fat Man on The Left: Four Decades in the Underground, published in 1998. The first book came about when author Lionel Rolfe wrote about Rush Limbaugh in the San Francisco Chronicle, before Limbaugh was particularly famous. From there it traced many curious byways of the newspaper business and characters that business comes in contact with. The new volume is a series of essays focused on the Bohemian life and literature of California. It tells about musicians and actors, writers and poets, but also politics, philosophy, city planning, and the ugliness of human beings toward animals—everything from elephants to birds. Here you will find keyboard pioneer George Duke, Yoga teacher Indra Devi, dying Sierra glaciers, the coffee house scene of the 60s in Venice, labor organizing, Echo Park bohemians, the decline of the Los Angeles Times, the once-famous L.A. Free Press, and other matters of great import. Rolfe also squarely faces his own left wing politics, and admits it hasn’t changed him during the decades of his life. At the end, he returns to our brutal treatment of the animal world—“Are We Really The Smartest Creatures on Earth.”
Available now from Amazon:
Paperback: $12.95 Kindle: $9.50
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
